The series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft (BZNW) is one of the oldest and most highly regarded international scholarly book series in the field of New Testament studies. Since 1923 it has been a forum for seminal works focusing on Early Christianity and related fields. The series is grounded in a historical-critical approach and also explores new methodological approaches that advance our understanding of the New Testament and its world.

The introduction to this new guide sets out the sources (Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian), noting the problems connected with them, paying particular attention to the nature of the gospels, and the Synoptic versus the Johannine tradition. A substantial section will discuss scholarship on Jesus from the nineteenth century to the explosion of works in the present day, introducing and explaining the three different quests for the historical Jesus. Subsequent chapters will analyse key themes in historical Jesus research: Jesus Galilean origins; the scope of his ministry and models of holy men, particularly that of prophet; Jesus teaching and healing; his trial and crucifixion; the highly contentious question of his resurrection; and finally an exploration of the links between the Jesus movement and the early church. Throughout, the (often opposing) positions of a variety of key scholars will be explained and discussed (eg. Sanders, Crossan, Dunn, Wright, Brown).

Is there credible evidence that Jesus--the carpenter from the ancient town of Nazareth--really is the Son of God? In this video Bible study (DVD/digital video sold separately), based on the New York Times bestselling book The Case for Christ, participants journey with Lee Strobel on a quest for the truth about Jesus. Skeptics dismiss the Jesus of the Gospels by claiming there is no evidence that he was God's Son. But does their claim hold weight? And, if not, what evidence is there, especially outside the Bible? Lee Strobel--a former legal journalist and one-time atheist--presents the findings of his own search for truth. This study guide is ideal for: Believers who want to learn more about the hard evidence behind their faith. Christians who find themselves becoming uncertain or doubtful. Anyone investigating, curious, or even skeptical about Christianity. Sift through historical evidence and passages from a range of theologians, thinkers, philosophers, and laypeople on the topic of Jesus as you weigh compelling expert testimony that rejects easy answers. With discussion prompts, Bible passages, and personal reflection cues facilitated by contributor Garry Poole, Strobel invites you and your group to investigate the truth about Jesus Christ as he leads up to the facts that guided him from atheism to faith in Christ. By the end of this six-session study, groups may very well see Jesus in a new way--and even, like Strobel, find their life transformed. Sessions include: The Investigation of a Lifetime Eyewitness Evidence Evidence Outside the Bible Analyzing Jesus Evidence for the Resurrection Reaching Your Verdict Designed for use with The Case for Christ Video Study 9780310698517 (sold separately).

The historical study of the Jesus stories and the transmission of these stories through time has been of seminal importance to historians of religion. Critical historical examination allows scholars an escape from the confines of dogma, belief, and the theological interpretation. In recent years, historical Jesus studies have also opened up an important discussion concerning antiSemitism and early Christianity and the political and ideological filtering of the Jesus story of early Christianity through the Roman empire and beyond.
This comprehensive collection will bring together the vast array of historical research into the reality of the man, the teachings, and the acts and events ascribed to him that have served as the foundational story of one of the world's central religions.
The collection includes a substantial new introduction by the editor in the first volume and a full index in the last.

Why was Jesus, who said 'I judge no one', put to death for a political crime? Of course, this is a historical question-but it is not only historical. Jesus's life became a philosophical theme in the first centuries of our era, when 'pagan' and Christian philosophers clashed over the meaning of his sayings and the significance of his death. Modern philosophers, too, such as Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche, have tried to retrace the arc of Jesus's life and death. I Judge No One is a philosophical reading of the four memoirs, or 'gospels', that were fashioned by early Christ-believers and collected in the New Testament. It offers original ways of seeing a deeply enigmatic figure who calls himself the Son of Man. David Lloyd Dusenbury suggests that Jesus offered his contemporaries a scandalous double claim. First, that human judgements are pervasive and deceptive; and second, that even divine laws can only be fulfilled in the human experience of love. Though his life led inexorably to a grim political death, what Jesus's sayings revealed-and still reveal-is that our highest desires lie beyond the political.

One of the characteristic pursuits of the current phase of historical Jesus research, the so-called Third Quest, has been the serious attempt to locate Jesus within first-century CE Judaism, to seek a Jesus who could be found plausible within his Jewish context. Comparatively less emphasis has been laid on the question as to whether or how the contextually plausible picture of Jesus also suits and accounts for thehistory of the reception of Jesus in early Christianity. By integrating the Jewish context, the teaching of Jesus and Christian reception history into one explanation, the continuum perspective seeks to reveal a Jesus who would both be fitting within his Jewish context and would also help to explain and understand early Christian stances. Thus, according to this perspective, a historically plausible picture of Jesus is one that can be placed in the Judaism-Christianity continuum.

Scholarly literature on Jesus has often attempted to relate his miracles to their Jewish context, but that context has not been surveyed in its own right. The present study supplies that lack by examining both the ideas on miracle in Second Temple literature (including Josephus, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) and the evidence for contemporary Jewish miracle workers. The penultimate chapter explores insights from cultural anthropology to round out the picture obtained from the literary evidence, and the study concludes that Jesus is distinctive as a miracle-worker in his Jewish context while nevertheless fitting into it.

William Wrede was among the first to recognise the creative contribution of the Gospel writers. His work thus laid the foundation for the work of the Form Critics, Redaction Critics and Literary Critics whose scholarship dominated New Testament studies during the twentieth century. This highly influential work was throughout this period the departure point for all studies in the Gospel of Mark and in the literary methods of the evangelists. It remains highly relevant for its ground-breaking approach to the classically complicated question of whether Jesus saw himself and represented himself as the Messiah.

Poetry, Rosenthal argues, focuses the imagination of a culture as no other written form can. In each chapter of her book, she considers the world's poets as Shelley's 'unacknowledged legislators' - creators who dreamed or destroyed visions of Jesus which shaped the spiritual climate of their times and nations. The book, though wide-ranging in its coverage and impeccably researched, is written extremely accessibly, as though for the general reader, hence it should appeal to the literature and poetry market more broadly as well as scholars of both poetry and Christianity.

The revival of interest in the Protestant Reformation in the mid-twentieth century was marked by several studies of John Calvin. J.F. Jansen, however, noted that these had shed new light on almost every aspect of his thought except that which lies at the heart of his theology - the doctrine of Christ's work. In Calvin's Doctrine of the Work of Christ, Jansen corrects this omission, providing a fresh study of Calvin's work in this area with special reference to his exegetical writings. Besides critiquing Calvin's development of the doctrine, he also examines the traditional theological formula of the three offices of Christ as prophet, priest and king. Reacting against the return to this formula by contemporary theologians such as Emil Brunner, he shows that an alternative conception of Christ's work is possible.

Early Christian legends of divine power, miraculous events, fear and admiration can inform your own spiritual journey.

The three principal infancy gospelsthe Infancy Gospel of James, the Gospel of the Infancy, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomasare accounts of the births and early lives of Mary the Virgin Mother, and Jesus. Originating in the second through fifth centuries, these apocryphal stories are fictions but nevertheless of great historical interest in terms of the beliefs and storytelling of early Christians, for they are the sources of well-known Christian legends as well as of some of Christianitys beloved heroes and heroines.

This fascinating and accessible exploration of formative influential narratives takes you deep into the early Christian religious thinking that provides the basis for Marys biography, ideas about her purity, as well as the prayers, feasts, and iconic representations that celebrate her life. These extraordinary folktales also provide some shocking imagery of the young Jesus, the incarnation of Godequally human and divineas he learns to control his supernatural powers and apply them for good.

Now you can experience the mystery and amusement of these charming folktales without any previous knowledge of early Christian history or thought. This SkyLight Illuminations edition offers insightful yet unobtrusive commentary that explains references and philosophical terms, shares inspiring interpretations, and gives you a deeper understanding of the sources of devotion Christians feel for Mary and the holy infant Jesus.

"Judas" is synonymous with "traitor." But a newly discovered ancient text of the Gospel of Judas offers a picture of Judas Iscariot radically different from the Church's traditional understanding of him, and maintains that far from being the infamous betrayer, Judas was actually Jesus's trusted friend and the recipient of secret revelation. Simon Gathercole's new book includes a translation of the ancient Egyptian text of the Gospel of Judas and a running commentary, and offers new translations of all the ancient evidence about Judas Iscariot and the Gospel attributed to him. It gets behind the hype which the Gospel of Judas has attracted, and looks at why the group which produced the work were in such bitter conflict with the mainstream Christian church, and shows how the document provides us with a window into the turbulent world of Christianity and Gnosticism in the century after Jesus.

This is the first of a four-volume ground-breaking study of Christological origins. The fruit of twenty years' research, Jesus Monotheism lays out a new paradigm that goes beyond the now widely held view that Paul and others held to an unprecedented 'Christological monotheism'. There was already, in Second Temple Judaism and in the Bible, a kind of 'christological monotheism'. But it is first with Jesus and his followers that a human figure is included in the identity of the one God as a fully divine person. Volume I lays out the arguments of an emerging consensus, championed by Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham, that from its Jewish beginnings the Christian community had a high Christology and worshipped Jesus as a divine figure. New data is put forward to support that case. But there are weaknesses in the emerging consensus. For example, it underplays the incarnation and does not convincingly explain what causes the earliest Christology. The recent study of Adam traditions, the findings of Enoch literature specialists, and of those who have explored a Jewish and Christian debt to Greco-Roman Ruler Cult traditions, all point towards a fresh approach to both the origins and shape of the earliest divine Christology.

This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities (dualist and monist; progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier 'heretical' tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism). This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the Enlightenment at its best.

The first full-length study to trace how early Christians came to perceive Jesus as a sinless human being. Jeffrey S. Siker presents a taxonomy of sin in early Judaism and examines moments in Jesus' life associated with sinfulness: his birth to the unwed Mary, his baptism by John the Baptist, his public ministry - transgressing boundaries of family, friends, and faith - and his cursed death by crucifixion. Although followers viewed his immediate death in tragic terms, with no expectation of his resurrection, they soon began to believe that God had raised him from the dead. Their resurrection faith produced a new understanding of Jesus' prophetic ministry, in which his death had been a perfect sacrificial death for sin, his ministry perfectly obedient, his baptism a demonstration of perfect righteousness, and his birth a perfect virgin birth. This study explores the implications of a retrospective faith that elevated Jesus to perfect divinity, redefining sin.

* Nearly twenty years on, this book is still a major point of reference for serious study of the historical Jesus * Companion volume to The New Testament and the People of God (1992), The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) and Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013).

How were the Johannine books of the New Testament received by second-century Christians and accorded scriptural status? Charles E. Hill offers a fresh and detailed examination of this question. He dismantles the long-held theory that the Fourth Gospel was generally avoided or resisted by orthodox Christians, while being treasured by various dissenting groups, throughout most of the second century. Integrating a wide range of literary and non-literary sources, this book demonstrates the failure of several old stereotypes about the Johannine literature. It also collects the full evidence for the second-century Church's conception of these writings as a group: the Johannine books cannot be isolated from each other but must be recognized as a corpus.

Now available for the first time in English, Karl Ludwig Schmidt's The Framework of the Story of Jesus (Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu) has been a foundation of New Testament studies. Through meticulous analysis, Schmidt demonstrates that the Synoptic Gospels are collections of individual stories that circulated orally and independently in the earliest Christian communities. Schmidt shows persuasively how, in their oral forms, most of these traditions existed apart from any sequence or specific temporal or geographic location, and that the chronology and locations now evident in the Gospels were applied by the evangelists while collecting and recording the oral traditions. Across much of the twentieth century and even into the present day, Schmidt's thesis has undergirded Gospel interpretation. Yet as long as The Framework of the Story of Jesus remained untranslated, Schmidt's ideas have been open to neglect and misinterpretation among Anglophone scholars. Discussion of the Synoptic Gospels and broader New Testament study will be enriched by engagement with the evidence and argument as originally presented.

This excellent work asks the important question: Is it right to describe Jesus as 'God'? Bringing together all the major biblical evidence as well as drawing on other early Jewish and Christian sources, this straightforward book provides a comprehensive view on the subject that is both accessible and authoritative, presenting both evidence in favour and some of the principal objections against the idea. While it will be of interest to anyone wishing to deepen their understanding of Scripture, it will have particular relevance for those with responsibility for leadership, teaching or evangelism in the church, as well as those in home groups. COMMENDATIONS "Anyone wishing to enlarge their view of Jesus or share their faith with others will unearth rich treasure in this book." - R.T. Kendall, Christian writer, speaker, and teacher; former Pastor of Westminster Chapel. "There is no shortage of exceptional books on Jesus, but David Lambourn's book offers a very readable and exciting examination of the greatest figure in human history." - Lord Carey, 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury

Based on the teachings of Jesus and a biblical foundation, this book presents a new framework for education and teaching, referred to as the shalom education model, that addresses four essential questions in education (why teach, what to teach, how to teach and who are teachers?). After explaining the theoretical background of shalom, the book investigates a range of contemporary educational issues including gender identity, bullying, disability, linguistic and cultural diversity, and social justice, and presents practical guidelines that can be applied to classroom teaching. The book also emphasizes the role of teachers as missional leaders who help students unlock their full potential.

Medieval miracle stories from a major pilgrim destination in 12c France. In the second half of the twelfth century Rocamadour developed an international reputation as a centre of devotion to the Virgin Mary, drawing pilgrims from Spain, Italy, Germany, England and the Latin East as well as France, as witnessed by the 126 miracle stories written there in 1172-3, here translated for the first time. Reflecting and enhancing Rocamadour's status (aristocratic figures feature prominently), they throw light on many of the dangers faced by medieval men and women: illness and injury; imprisonment; warfare; arbitrary justice; and natural disasters. In his introduction Marcus Bull identifies issues which the collection helps to elucidate, and assesses thevalue of the text as source material, particularly in view of the lack of other chronicles from southern France for the period. He makes comparisons with other texts, such as the miracle collection compiled at the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, and argues that the monks of Rocamadour asserted their importance through the miracles, in the face of competition from neighbouring monastic communities. MARCUS BULL is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Since the early 4th century, Christian pilgrims and visitors to Judea and Galilee have worshipped at and been inspired by monumental churches erected at sites traditionally connected with the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. This book examines the history and archaeology of early Christian holy sites and traditions connected with specific places in order to understand them as interpretations of Jesus and to explore them as instantiations of memories of him. Ryan's overarching aim is to construe these places as instantiations of what historian Pierre Nora has called "lieux de memoires," sites where memory crystallizes and, where possible, to track the course and development of the traditions underlying them from their genesis in the Gospel narratives to their eventual solidification in the form of pilgrimage sites. So doing will bring rarely considered evidence to the study of early Christian memory, which in turn helps to illuminate the person of Jesus himself in both history and reception.

Many experts in education, psychology, science, philosophy, politics, and across the social sciences and humanities believe that a plethora of people in the world have lost their way and lack a moral compass. In a world in which youth often lack guidance from parents, countless individuals are hurting from broken relationships, and many people lack a sense of purpose, direction, and a sense of who they are, there is a growing awareness around much of world that people should revisit the teachings of Jesus Christ for answers. The Bible is the most published book in the history of the world for a reason. At the heart of Christ's teachings is love, which sadly in many academic, political, and business circles has become the most feared four-letter word of all. In this context, the need to revisit the personal significance of the most quoted verse in the Bible, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only son..." and "God is love," is axiomatic. In a world filled with divisiveness, a dearth of civility, a lack of love, a dismissive attitude toward any sense of truth and absolute values, and the inability for people to get along, it would seem that there is no timelier action one can take than to ask the pertinent question, "What would Christ do?" It is a vital question to ask not only as it applies to one's personal life, but also to the world situation at large. For example, one can argue that the economic crisis of 2008-2009 in the West and the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998 were largely the result of lack of character and the love of money and power than pervaded the government, business, and the general population. One can argue that had the nations of the world been guided by the example of love, self-sacrifice, humility, and integrity that Christ set, those crises would not have happened. Life is filled with enough challenges without a lack of virtue creating more trials. Addressing the question of, "What would Christ do?" can help the reader engage in better decision making that can literally change one's life and help establish a reputation of love, character, and compassion that will open doors into a better life.